Happiness

Use the mouse and its left button. Click and drag to move your view. Press F3 for 3x scaled window.

I wanted this entry to be an exploration in "ambient gaming", so I appreciate that it won't be for a lot of people. If you get frustrated trying to work out what's going on, the overview and instructions are below:

--- Overview:

You play as a malicious supernatural being spectating an office building. You have very little power over the world except for the ability to render electrical equipment broken for a short amount of time, even this power is limited. You want nothing more than to see the world void from happiness.

--- Instructions:

Clicking and dragging anywhere on the screen will move your view port.

You can click on electrical equipment to deprive people from using it for a short time, the time can be extended by clicking the equipment again, doing this uses energy which slowly replenishes at the bottom of the screen. You can hover over people to see their current statistics, these are shown in a bubble above their head in the following order:

Ratings

Comments

Hm, I don't think I really understood the game. I can click on printers and water dispensers, but besides the timer nothing is happening? Should I keep people from using them by keeping the timers active? What are the bars above people's heads? Not sure whether it's intentional, but there doesn't seem to be music, just that persistent deep tone? This would work, but it's too loud and there should be at least some additional notes (maybe I just missed on that). You'll definitely need a better description though.

I really like the graphics and the concept, but i think what will disturb people is the lack of reaction from little budies, maybe in a future version you could had some tiny icon to make us think "oh so you wanted some coffee ? TOO BAD !"

You can get a bigger game window by hitting F3, which will scale by 3x instead of 2x. If you meant being able to see more of the game area, that's understandable, but it's one of them things I consider and would have usually decided on from play testing, unfortunately no play testing took place.

@Edocentrique

> lack of reaction from little budies, maybe in a future version you could had some tiny icon to make us think "oh so you wanted some coffee ? TOO BAD !"

I was going to have little icons to indicate when they're talking or drinking water or crying or thinking about doing something, but I'd ran out of time and it was one of the features I ended up leaving out. Don't worry though, you can still gain pleasure from depriving them from using a vending machine while their hunger bar increases.

I like the graphics and I love the idea of the concept. Although I don't see any feedbacks of my actions, since the happiness counter keeps going down in a linear way. I don't understand why I can't interact with other objects like laptop and elevators, and I see no expression or feedback on the face of the humans.
Great potential and atmosphere, but I fear that it missed its target.

Implementation needs a bit of work to really shine. The little guys really need to show when they are doing something, or being deprived of something. Those 'need' bars need some clarification, maybe with icons. Also, how do I influence boredom? Is that the copy machines? What about fatigue?

Great game :) Depriving them of food and water was enough to make them unhappy. Tried to get them all on one floor/ in one corner by disabling only certain machines. Dunno if it work tough or i was just being lucky :)

lack of response of the characters to what I was doing was kind of meh, other than that a pretty cool and original idea :). You weren't really seeing them trying to access something either. Unfortunately all you do is just clicking around, not much of a challenging aspect to it.

The gameplay wasn't very intuitive, I didn't feel like anything I did had any affect on the world. The ambient sound gets extremely loud at points. I loved the art style. A post-compo version with visual queues would be wodnerful.

The audio gave me a headache at first. I guess I had my volume up too high. The visual style was charming, but I felt the game lacked a goal, as it didn't seem possible to ever get the happyness down to 0%

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